A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg (33 page)

Rayner said, “I didn’t write the article.”

“They quote you directly, though. You say we were in ‘good but fatigued condition.’ ”

“Well, we saw your footprints across the valley,” Rayner said. “That’s a tiring walk. And we could see you were in
good condition when we flew over. So: ‘good but fatigued condition.’ ”

The chief ranger seemed a little embarrassed. He recounted some of the rescues he’d participated in, and one of the deaths he knew about. Rayner seemed to be saying that he’d just as soon nobody walked across Death Valley in the summertime. It was his job to discourage such treks—to put guardrails along the cliffs—and he apparently felt that newspaper articles about half-dead dumbshits in the desert were something of a public service. He was a good man who just purely hated the idea of people getting hurt in his park.

“Would you do it again?” Rayner asked.

I glanced over at the Indiana Jones of photography, who was smiling in a manner that made him look somewhat psychological. “We could change the rules,” he said. “No stashes. We walk from spring to spring and carry portable water purifiers. Badwater to Tule Spring to Trail Canyon …”

Dick Rayner seemed intrigued. Certainly against his better judgment, he pointed to the map on his desk and said, “There’s a spring here that would get you into the canyon in better shape.”

I
t is like no night on the face of the earth: in this cave the darkness is palpable and it physically swallows the brightest light. The air underground smells clean, damp, curiously sterile. It feels thick, like freshly washed still-damp velvet, and I am about to rappel down a long single strand of rope into the heart of all that heavy darkness. This is the second deepest cave pit in America: the drop is four hundred and forty feet, about what you’d experience from the top of a forty-story building. If you took the shaft in free-fall you’d accelerate to one hundred and some miles an hour and then—about six seconds into the experience—instantly decelerate to zero miles an hour. And die. Wah-hoo-hoo over and out. With six bad seconds to think about it.

Contemplating those six seconds sets the mind slithering through some dank and chilling chambers. The worst of it happens at the precipice. There you are, hooked into the rope, ready to back off the cliff and slide down into the darkness of the abyss and it feels like some mushy daytime soap “On the Brink of Forever.” Suppose a horde of bats comes belching out of the pit—damn nasty screeching rabid little suckers. They could get caught in your hair, bite your ass, interfere with your concentration. And God only knows what other horrors may lurk in the depths so few have penetrated. Monsters out of H. P. Lovecraft’s fevered dreams. Listen, and you can hear them down there in the darkness, scheming, conspiring, gibbering with blood lust. (Probably just the sound of running water, probably just a
small falls somewhere in the darkness.) Ah, but it feels like a place for bubbling sulphur pits, for lakes of fire complete with damned souls screaming in eternal torment. Oh, Dante would love it here on the lip of Incredible Pit, deep inside Ellison’s Cave under Pigeon Mountain just outside Lafayette, Georgia.

All black fancy, generated out of primal fear, this train of thought. Better to contemplate the expedition as a whole: Ellison’s Cave is simply the most spectacular vertical caving experience in America. It is rated as one of the most physically taxing and technically difficult wild caves anywhere.

A lot of people who don’t go into caves have theories about why other people do. There’s talk that gets all fuzzy and Freudian around the edges, a lot of thumb-sucking nonsense about figurative returns to the womb that makes cavers seem just a tad, oh, psychotic. The truth is simple enough: certain people go into caves because most folks don’t. The urge is called exploration and everyone understands it to one degree or another. We were, all of us, explorers from our first breath, in a time our world expanded in wonder.

The physical act of exploration is still possible. The forests may be gone, and land is replete with shopping malls and fast-food outlets, but drop half a mile into the earth and there is a pristine wilderness of danger and challenge and alien, almost obscene, beauty. There is wonder left in the world.

The order cavers impose on this wonder is called making the connection. A connection has been made when a person manages to crawl, climb, slide, or swim from one cave entrance and exit through another.

The connection is the stated goal, just as making the summit is the mountaineer’s goal. And just as each mountain presents a series of unique challenges, so does each cave. Ellison’s is a kind of Everest of American caving. The primary obstacles to be overcome are two large pits: holes in the ground, deep below the surface of the earth, each of them large enough to contain a forty- or fifty-story building.

Dropping these natural shafts on a single rope may be an act of exploration, but there’s more than a tad of terror vibrating in the core of the wonder. Consequently, standing in the darkness, on the Brink of Forever, I check my rig for the fifth or sixth time. Yes, yes, everything just so. Seat harness—A-OK. Carabiner—locked. How’s the rope? Is it threaded properly through the rappel rack? There is a right way to do this and a wrong way. The wrong way is called a “death rig.”

I’ve got a bag hanging from the seat harness and it contains all the things I’ll need for the projected twelve to twenty hours it should take us to make the connection. Check out the contents: a spare light, some candles, lighters, warm clothes in a plastic bag to keep them dry, some spare bits of hardware, a couple of roast beef sandwiches. Yes, sir, dropping down to the ninth level of hell and bringing along a lunch.

The folks who have brought me here are pros, experts, and it seems wise to seek their counsel at the Brink. “Am I death rigged here or what?”

Kent Ballew gives my rappel rack a cursory glance. “Looks good to me,” he says. Looks good? What does he mean, looks good? Lots of things look good to Kent Ballew. Women with pouty mouths look good to Kent Ballew. Fast cars look good to Kent Ballew. Do I really want to spend the last six seconds of my life thinking about what looks good to Kent Ballew?

“You mean I’m in solid,” I persist, “not death rigged?”

“That would be my considered opinion,” Kent says, since he has determined that I require a degree of formality and certitude in this matter.

And so I walk backward to the edge of the pit, lean back on the rope I’ve rigged into, and begin falling out into nothing. It is as if my intention is to do a back flip into the pit.

L
arry “Smokey” Caldwell, arguably one of the most astute and inventive vertical cavers in the world, felt my life was worth a week’s training anyway. Vertical caving, as practiced by Caldwell and his cohorts, is not a skill someone picks up in a day. Single rope technique (SRT) is an elegantly esoteric art, and my guess is that the people who are any good at it can be counted in the hundreds. Smokey runs a business—Pigeon Mountain Industries in Lafayette, Georgia—that caters to these folks. PMI manufactures the specialized rope used in vertical caving, and it sells the various bits of hardware needed to literally walk up a rope. The techniques Smokey and men like “Vertical Bill” Cuddington pioneered translate well to endeavors beyond the realm of sport. PMI sells rope and gear (and sometimes expertise) to fire fighters, mountain rescue teams, and the military. Indeed, my partner in training with Smokey was John VandenBurg, a fire fighter from Ontario, Canada. He would use his training to save lives—to rescue people on the top floors of a burning high-rise, for instance—and I would use mine to explore America’s deepest caves.

Smokey started us off on a simple outdoor cliff—a sixty-foot drop called the Eagles Nest—and soon enough we progressed to sinkholes, large pits open to the air. My favorite was called Valhalla, though Kent Ballew, an employee of PMI, found it spooky in the extreme. Kent is the kind of guy who can do a bootlegger’s 180 degree turn on a Chattanooga street, dead sober, and then discuss the matter with an officer of the law in such a way that he gets off with a stern warning. Kent, you sense, is a man who lives a life full of stern warnings. Like most hard-core cavers, he finds calculated risk a life-affirming activity.

And that is why what happened a few years ago in the pit called Valhalla upset him so badly. Some cavers had rappeled into the 260-foot pit and were waiting there, under an overhanging rock the size of a 18-wheel truck. The overhang
protected them from falling rocks displaced by cavers above, and it was entirely wise for them to be sitting there. But the rock gave way, and the two cavers were crushed beneath its unthinkable weight.

Smokey and Kent were on the team that recovered the bodies. They had to dig under the rock, and what they found there has haunted Kent Ballew ever since. “Valhalla used to be my favorite pit,” Kent told me. “I used to do it twenty times a year or more. Now it’s like the pit’s turned hostile. Those guys did everything right and the pit killed them.”

We did Valhalla on a weekend. Perhaps fifty spectators were watching when Kent Ballew began his descent. He backed over the lip and, it seemed, just let go. It looked like he had come out of the rope, like he was falling, and several people screamed. This is the way Kent rappels, and he relishes screams of terror from concerned onlookers.

I followed him down. The brake bar rack used for these long rappels is an elongated horseshoe-shaped device. The rope is threaded through six crossing bars and the bars may be slid close together to create friction and thus slow the descent. Spread the bars out for a Kent Ballew–like full-tilt rappel.

Valhalla was surrounded by foliage at the top. Inside, it was a symphony of sculpted, soaring rock, and I wanted to take my time. Bright summer sun filtered through the trees surrounding the pit, and a dozen shafts of slanting light fell inside the pit in pure operatic overstatement.

The PMI rope we were using was specially designed for long rappels. It consisted of a braided outer sheath that protects the load-bearing inner core from abrasion. The core was composed of twenty-two parallel strands of spliceless nylon. This static kernmatle type of construction meant the rope did not spin, and had very little stretch. A mountaineering rope, by contrast, is designed to stop a falling climber and must stretch to cushion the shock that occurs when some plummeting unfortunate reaches the end of his tether.

This is not to say that PMI rope has no stretch at all. At
the bottom of a pit like Valhalla, for instance, when you stand and take your weight off the rope it pulls up a few feet. This upward pressure makes it difficult to get the rappel rack off the rope. For this reason it is a good idea to lift the legs and rappel until you are almost sitting on solid ground. Which is what I was doing—cruising to a sit-down landing in this open to the sky pit—when I saw the copperhead snake coiled directly below. At such times, one doesn’t reflect that the only way a snake could get to the bottom of the pit would be a fast and fatal 260-foot fall. The copperhead was curled in striking position. I grabbed the rope, pulled myself up, and said “wok!” in the manner of a man who has stepped barefoot onto something squishy and foul and possibly alive. Ballew, who had put the dead snake under the rope, thought this was among the more humorous things he had ever seen. I discussed his sense of humor with him, and the discussion was in the nature of a stern warning.

Still, we left the snake there for photographer Nick Nichols, who was next on the rope. Nick has been photographing caves for a dozen years and is well known in the speleological community. Because caves, as opposed to sinkholes like Valhalla, are perfectly dark, it is impossible to get an idea of their dimensions with one light. Nick’s genius is to illuminate the caves with light—with a combination of old-fashioned flash guns, flares, radio-controlled strobe lights, and great white hot magnesium explosions. Cavers accompany Nick—he gets them to carry his gear—into the deepest and most inaccessible caves because he will provide them with photographs of a place they have been to but have never really seen.

Because I was with Nick, Smokey and Kent saw to it that we hit the deepest cave pits in the Southeast. This process of rappeling down and climbing back up without attempting to make a connection, is called “yo-yoing the pit.” One day we yo-yoed the 282-foot-deep Mystery Hole just outside Chattanooga, once thought to be the deepest cave pit in America. There had been a death in this cave as well. Back in 1959, 18-year-old Jimmy Shadden had attempted to descend
into the Mystery Hole on a frayed ski rope and fell to his death. The rope, it was found later, had a breaking strength of 270 pounds. (PMI’s
7
⁄
16
-inch rope has a maximum tensile strength of 6,800 pounds.)

There is a waterfall in the Mystery Hole, and a caver named Buddy Lane has devised a clever dam so people no longer have to descend and ascend through the freezing spray. We dammed the falls and rappeled down into the darkness of the Mystery Hole. Buddy Lane, who accompanied us on this one, stayed up top to let the water drain out of the dam once the rest of us were on the floor of the pit. It came crashing down, 280 feet, and the bottom of the pit was a roaring chaos of howling mist for over five minutes. Ballew said a word of prayer for “ski-rope Jimmy” (whom he regarded as a friendly spirit), Buddy Lane redammed the waterfall for us, and we began climbing up the rope in the dark.